Question

Basically, I am try to write a program where I need to login into my email account and check the header of recently delivered emails.

I am a complete novice in terms of this type of stuff and would prefer to do the programming in Ruby. I also have some skill in Python if this would make the task easier. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The documentation for Python’s imaplib library includes an example that does pretty much that:

import getpass, imaplib

M = imaplib.IMAP4()
M.login(getpass.getuser(), getpass.getpass())
M.select()
typ, data = M.search(None, 'ALL')
for num in data[0].split():
    typ, data = M.fetch(num, '(RFC822)')
    print 'Message %s\n%s\n' % (num, data[0][1])
M.close()
M.logout()

You can modify the search string from 'ALL' to e.g. (since "24-May-2012"). I don’t think IMAP supports searching by times; you’ll probably have to do that filtering yourself.